collecting

IBM’s 120 million gigabyte array, the world’s largest data center, could hold 60 copies of the Wayback Machine, the Internet Archive’s backup of the entire web.

“This 120 petabyte system is on the lunatic fringe now, but in a few years it may be that all cloud computing systems are like it,” says Bruce Hillsberg, director of IBM storage systems in Almaden, California.

Bytes were never built to last. Hard-drives inevitably fail; links rot; web services fold. The legacy of our civilization, our shared history and culture, depends upon the endurance of digital collections.

Archive, a compendium of documentaries told from the perspective of archivists and cultural producers, looks at the history of the Internet and attempts to archive its contents on a massive scale: from Archive.org’s Wayback Machineto the Amazon Glacier.